Stories from One Thousand and One Nights: For Intermediate and Advanced Students of Arabic

235 Pages·2019·2.09 MB·English

by  Ghada Bualuan

Stories from One Thousand
and One Nights
Specially designed for students of Arabic, this textbook presents a selection of authentic Arabian
Night stories in simplified language providing learners of Modern Standard Arabic access to this
classic of Arabic literature.
Each story is fully supported by a range of comprehension, vocabulary-building, grammar
reinforcement activities and exercises as well as an audio version of the story, which can be
accessed at www.routledge.com/9781138948228.
Ideal for class-use or self-study, students will enhance their reading, listening, and writing
skills while developing the ability to analyze literary texts, reason critically, and broaden their
understanding and appreciation of different layers of Arab culture.
Ghada Bualuan is Associate Teaching Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the
Program of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Stories from One
Thousand and
One Nights
For Intermediate and Advanced
Students of Arabic
Ghada Bualuan
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Ghada Bualuan
The right of Ghada Bualuan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-94820-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-94822-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66968-7 (ebk)
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Contents
ContentsContents
Preface viii
Introduction 1
Stories
1 The Story of King Shahryar and His Brother Shah Zaman 4
2 The Story of the Merchant and the Jinni 18
3 The Story of the Fisherman and the Jinni 31
4 The Tale of the Man and the Dish of Gold (and the Dog) 44
5 The Story of the Ruined Man From Baghdad (The Man Who Became Rich
Again Through a Dream) 55
6 The First Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman 63
7 The Second Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman 73
8 The Girl and the Apples and the Slave Rihan (The Three Apples) 83
9 The Story of Two Lovers of the Bani ‘Uthra 95
10 The Story of Khalid Bin ‘Abdullah al-Qasri and the Lover Who Feigned
Himself a Thief 105
11 The Story of the Boy From Baghdad and the Slave-Girl 116
12 The Story of the A‘rabi and His Loyal Wife 128
13 The Story of Yahya bin Khalid (Yahya bin Khalid the Barmecide With Mansour) 139
14 Al-Malik al-Nasir and the Three Governors (Al-Malik al-Nasir and the Three
Chiefs of Police) 152
15 The Story of the Sad Man (The Man Who Never Laughed During the Rest of
His Days) 163
16 The Story of Ibrahim and Jamilah 176
17 The Story of Khusrau and Shirin and the Fisherman 190
18 The Story of the Sharper and the Governor of Alexandria (The Sharper of
Alexandria and the Chief of Police) 199
Glossary 209
Preface
Narrative is a trap. Anyone who has read The One Thousand and One Nights (The Nights) has
become caught up in an aesthetic world of enchantment, of rampant and of enduring imagination.
Shahrazād’s voice is still reverberating throughout the centuries (Borges, Obras completas, IV:
625), and The Nights have become “part of our memory,” as Jorge Luis Borges avows (Seven
Nights, 47).
The Nights has been a great source of inspiration and a major element in forming the imagina-
tion and narrative techniques of great minds: Goethe’s (1749–1832) mind’s eye as a child was
incited by its tales, which both his mother and grandmother used to narrate to him, and he used to
spend his days trying to concoct an ending to a story that was left unfinished before he went to
bed the night before (Mommsen, 66). Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Herman Melville (1819–
1891), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Naguib Mahfouz (1911–
2006), and Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), as well as dozens of other literary figures in
world literature, and modern Arab novelists (Jarrar, 303–15), have all been lost in admiration of
this rich trove of enframed and interpolated tales of artistic complexity that celebrates movement
and transmogrification.
The literary history of The Nights is interesting and intricate. The earliest preserved document
that provides evidence to the existence of The Nights is a papyri fragment that dates to the ninth
century which preserves the frame-story of Shahrazād and Shahrayār under the title of One Thou-
sand and One Nights. Two other descriptions from tenth-century Baghdad also confirm the exis-
tence of a certain book under the title of Hazār afsāneh (Thousand Tales); it is of Sanskrit origin
and translated into Arabic from middle Persian as One Thousand and One Nights. The book
contained, however, less than two hundred tales. From that point of its literary history, the perma-
nent transformation of the text of The Nights, which discloses a complex oral and written process,
becomes difficult to trace. Like a magnet, the exceptionally alluring frame-story was incorporated
over the centuries with different layers of folktales, fairytales, and romances from both high and
popular literatures. The tales embraced a range of motifs and allusions, plots and structures, to
more elusive thematic units which are traceable to Arabic, Indian, Persian, Greek, Babylonian,
Hebrew, and other lores. The Nights was very popular during the reign of the Mamlūks (1250 to
1517), whence two families of the ‘inconclusive’ text – of no single origin – were known, one of
Syrian and the other of Egyptian descent.
The first translation of an adaptation of The Nights into European languages was introduced by
the French Orientalist and diplomat to the Ottoman Empire Antoine Galland (1646–1715), who
was enchanted by the stories of The Nights which he had had the chance to listen to in oral ses-
sions. Galland’s translation formed a new poetic force that set the Romantic imagination of the
European literati and the reading public ablaze during the eighteenth century. Subsequent transla-
tions and adaptations followed in English and German. The reception of The Nights afterwards
took place during a period of colonial expansion, which was a significant feature of its history.
ix Preface
The interest in The Nights unleashed a craving for Oriental tales and an energetic search for man-
uscripts of the text, which led to continuous efforts to add new material to The Nights down to the
nineteenth century, when the first prints in Arabic appeared. Noteworthy in this regard is that the
first Calcutta print run (1814–1818) was sponsored by the British East India Company for the use
of its employees who were learning Arabic.
Teaching The Nights
The One Thousand and One Nights, argues Jorge Luis Borges, is “an experiment with time. In this
there is another kind of beauty. I think it lies in the fact that for us the word thousand is almost
synonymous with infinite. To say a thousand nights it is to say infinite nights, countless nights,
endless nights. To say a thousand and one nights is to add one to infinity” (Seven Nights, 38). In
this sense The Nights is a spectacle of universal cultural knowledge, of enchantment and ongoing
metamorphosis, of humor and wisdom. At the same time, it is a didactic book that edifies and
instructs in an entertaining manner. The One Thousand and One Nights is a celebration of move-
ment, narrative structures, and discursive control.
It is these and other related manifestations that make The Nights a suitable book for instructive
and dialogical interaction.
I have been teaching The Nights since 1994 within the frame of an undergraduate course on
Arabic Narratology at The American University of Beirut. My first acquaintance with The Nights
was at the age of twelve when, in my parents’ home library, I came through a pruned, expurgated,
and illustrated family edition (1956) in seven volumes printed by the Catholic Press to be taught
in secondary schools. However, for the course on narratology I opted to experiment with the stu-
dents with the original, undocked Egyptian Būlāq edition of 1853 – and it worked beautifully.
The students, aged between eighteen and twenty, attend this course as a humanities elective to
cover the University Arabic requirement. They come from all possible majors (pre-Med, engi-
neering, sociology, literature, business, as well as other majors). They also belong to various
social and religious backgrounds, and many of them are citizens of other Arab countries. We first
start the course by reading together the frame-story of Shahrazād and Shahrayār, which serves as
a vector to introduce in the first three weeks the various elements of narrative theory, voice, nar-
rative levels, and communication situations. Notwithstanding the explicit language and situations
inherent in the frame-story, the fascination of the students, and accordingly their engagement,
becomes immense when we start reading different studies on the frame-story (in Arabic and
English) that deal with its literary history; its narrative structures; the incorporated fable; its
themes of death, sacrifice, sexuality, gender, voyeurism, and other literary and psychological
aspects; and the various situations of space in this literary masterpiece, as well as feminist read-
ings. The articles (and chapters from books) are studied and presented in class by the students.
During the discussions, students admire the different research approaches, the latent themes of
‘time gaining’ and ‘delivery from death,’ and the edifying idea of healing and character transfor-
mation through storytelling.
In the last five weeks, following the same process of introducing suitable studies and preparing
exposés, we read together one of the long cycles in The Nights (Ḥāsib Karīm al-Dīn and the
Queen of Serpents, Sindbād, The Fisherman and the Jinni, or The Porter and the Three Ladies),
which are replete with the miraculous, the supernatural, aesthetic phantasmagoria, and artistic
representations, and, at the same time, abound with religious motifs and morals. Throughout the